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Nearly a year has passed since Rebecca Knickmeyer first met the participants in her latest study on brain development. Knickmeyer, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, expects to see how 30 newborns have grown into crawling, inquisitive one-year-olds, using a battery of behavioural and temperament tests. Then, if all goes well, the kids should nap peacefully as a noisy magnetic resonance imaging machine scans their brains.
“We try to be prepared for everything,” Knickmeyer says. “We know exactly what to do if kids make a break for the door.”
Knickmeyer is excited to see something else from the children — their faecal microbiota, the array of bacteria, viruses and other microbes that inhabit their guts. Her project (affectionately known as ‘the poop study’) is part of a small but growing effort by neuroscientists to see whether the microbes that colonize the gut in infancy can alter brain development.
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The project comes at a crucial juncture. A growing body of data, mostly from animals raised in sterile, germ-free conditions, shows that microbes in the gut influence behaviour and can alter brain physiology and neurochemistry.
In humans, the data are more limited. Researchers have drawn links between gastrointestinal pathology and psychiatric neurological conditions such as anxiety, depression, autism, schizophrenia and neurodegenerative disorders — but they are just links.
Read full, original post: The tantalizing links between gut microbes and the brain
